‘X-MEN: FIRST CLASS’ SEQUEL WRITER SAYS FILM WILL BE “MORE EPIC AND MYTHIC”

X-Men: First Class was shockingly good; far better than it had any right to be, really. It combined a stylish, James Bond-esque 1960’s setting with elements of superhero spectacle, and had two wonderful leads in James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. While it didn’t exactly light the box office on fire, FOX felt it performed well enough to greenlight a sequel, which is currently being written by Simon Kinberg (X-3: The Last Stand, Sherlock Holmes). Back in February, a rumor surfaced that the film would be an adaptation of one of the seminal adventures in the X-Men’s long and storied history: Days of Future Past. In that story, a member of the X-Men from a dystopian future where mutants are interred at concentration camps travels back in time to warn the present-day X-Men that they must stop the assassination of a politician in order to prevent that horrible future reality from occurring.

A few days ago Kinberg spoke to Collider after his appearance at a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, and his comments seem to point in that direction:

[quote]”I can tell you that it’s going really well, and I can tell you that I’ve been working closely with [director]Matthew Vaughn and [co-writer] Jane Goldman on the script of the movie and that we hope to be shooting in Spring of next year to come out in July of 2014 and that I’m really excited about it, because the only thing I can say, because I have to be extraordinarily vague about it, because the last time I talked to anybody about it, I got in trouble…big trouble…what I can tell you is [that]it’s extraordinarily ambitious. It is unlike the other X-Men movies and yet very much a celebration of the X-Men movies… [I] think it is as dramatic as that movie, but more epic, mythic in a way as well. So, there are ideas that we’ve started with that haven’t survived, there are ideas that we started with from conversations we had from making First Class that are going to be in the sequel.[/quote]

Now, I’ve attuned my Vague Hollywood Bullshit Detector to “screenwriter” mode, and here’s what Kinberg is actually saying, “I screwed up back in February by saying we were probably going to adapt Days of Future Past. Every geek in the free world knows we are going to adapt Days of Future Past, but I can’t officially tell you that yet. But, umm, yeah, we are totally doing Days of Future Past.”

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Jeff is the defining voice of his generation. Sadly, that generation exists only in an alternate dimension where George Lucas became supreme overlord of the Earth in 1979 and replaced every television broadcast and theatrical film on the planet with Star Wars and Godzilla movies. In this dimension, he’s just a guy from New England who likes writing snarky things about superheroes, monsters, and robots.